How to Create a Student Online Exam in Just a Few Minutes

Making an online exam for students has never been more difficult to figure out. Moreover, at a time when it is crucial to use e-assessment systems to digitalize the educational process, including exams, developing successful online assessments is currently a hot topic.

But before we continue, what steps do you typically take to publish a research paper?

1. Choose the most prestigious research journal with a good impact factor and send the paper for consideration

2. Check the journal’s topics first and if it applies to your research

3. Consider the journal’s audience and whether it’s better to choose a field-specific journal or head to one with a broad range of topics

4. Decide the time to publication the journal offers and whether this is convenient for you

5. All of the above

The answer is e. Every step along the way counts! The same goes for how to create an online exam. Simply using any exam automation application without considering all its aspects and testing it beforehand is a grave mistake.

If you work at an educational institution, you already spend so much time and effort bringing your game in the dozens of tasks you have to do. That’s why this blog shares a few tips that can help you conquer exam creation with confidence. So if you want to know how to prepare an online exam and be updated with the most modern ways to do that, keep on reading!

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How to Make an Online Exam for Students

First of all, online exams generally refer to exams done using a device. There must be an Internet connection in the student’s device as well in order for him/her to answer all questions. Here’s how it works:

• Forget about the location and time of the exam if you want. Online exams can be performed anywhere and anytime since there is an Internet connection and the student doesn’t have to be in a certain place to take the exam.
• The e-assessment system is installed and set up on the student’s device.  

• You are free to administer an online exam to an unlimited number of students at the same time. Online exams make it all possible. On the other hand, you can choose the time preferred to take the exam in and students do not have to take it at the same time (get more insight into how to do this from Difference between Online Exam and Offline Exam).
• The student is trained first on the system in a trial session in which he/she can be introduced to how the exam will run.
• In case any student’s online exam was interrupted due to Internet connection failure, e.g., the student goes on to do the exam offline without feeling any interruption or change.
• The exam is monitored and once the exam time comes to an end, the exam closes.

How to Prepare Online Exam Questions

1. Consider Your Course Structure and Objectives

When you start preparing your online exam questions, whether they are already in the questions bank or not, don’t miss out on the most important thing: the questions need to be relevant to what students already studied! So consider your lessons’ objectives and the difficulty level of each question.

An advanced online exams system can help you choose questions relevant to each and every objective of the curriculum.  

2. Use Higher and Lower Thinking Questions

There’s an all-time race to find new ways to cheat going on with rigorous efforts to prevent it on the other side.

Taking the time to consider lower- and higher-order thinking questions not only makes your exam richer and more balanced, it also is an exam cheating prevention trick you can use all the time!

Your online exams system will help you choose categorized questions according to Bloom’s new theory. This way you can measure their evaluation and creativity as well as remembering, understanding, and applying what they already know during the exam.

3. Choose the Right Type of Questions for Your Exam

Whether it’s science or literature you teach usually makes a world of difference when creating your online exam.  When it’s time to add your exam questions, you might find your task a bit overwhelming if you have to worry every time you have a complex equation question in mind. Or you might have a video or image question you want to add to the exam. This means you need a friendly, easy to use exams system interface.    

That’s why it’s definitely extremely important to choose a good online exams system that will help you in how to prepare online exam questions.

4. Make Sure Your Exam Questions Are Valid

Now it’s time to double check your questions. Have they been in last year’s final exam? Maybe they were even in the last 3 years consequently.

We understand it might look like an easy task, but it’s actually proven a bit difficult with the rush of final exams creation, grading, and all the other tasks on top of that!

5. Choose Your Online Exam Layout

Online exams software offers both regular as well as sectioned layouts and unified as well as multiple test forms to reduce cheating possibility and ensure equity among students. The multiple sectioned exam means your exam can show one question at a time and this way you can limit students’ getting distracted by looking over all the exam  

How to Catch Students Looking Up Answer Online during Exam

A few days ago, the Telegraph published an interesting article titled “University Students Offer to Pay Tutors to Take Their Online Exams During Pandemic” on exams cheating in top universities in the world. Since most tests have been moved online due to the COVID-19 disaster, students have started taking them in more convenient places, bedrooms, workspaces, etc.

Surprisingly, the Telegraph revealed that some tutors of more than one subject said that students have approached them virtually offering to pay them by thousands of pounds just if they will do their tests instead! One tutor even stated that this happened four times in one month!

University leaders have been accused of “sticking their heads in the sand” over the scale of cheating, brought about by hundreds of thousands of students doing exams effectively unsupervised.

Moreover, last month, In-Cyprus told even more worrying news. Maria Kramvia who works as a Professor at the Technological University of Cyprus acknowledged another phenomenon there, where students pay other people, a third person, to do their work, take the exam on their behalf.

there are many students who achieve their evaluation by “using” the work of a third person, meaning they pay someone to do the work on their behalf or even to take the exam on their behalf. As she said, due to the pandemic, this phenomenon has increased because of the use of online exams.

Here are some of the solutions the professor offered to stop this from happening, or at least detect it once it does happen:

• Introducing a Code of Honor to students and explaining it to them
• Live monitoring on the spot
• metrics
• Random position of students
• Use the same questions but with different multiple choices
• Different questions to each student

The issue of cheating is not new at all. It’s arisen to be more important recently in the context of online exams. Some educational institutions prefer to give open-book exams just to avoid all the trouble that comes with other types of exams online! However, other institutions tackle the issue of cheating by taking more strict security measures, reaching for efficient online exam creation applications or systems. Some even choose to acquire more than one system just to take advantage of all the features and benefits both offer!

In the middle of all the change that’s firmly gripped the world, top universities and schools are seeking ways to stop their examination system from becoming untethered, or at least changing it in ways that are more suitable to this new world.

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